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Ecommerce SEO is the process of increasing the visibility of your online store in search engine results pages (SERPs). When people search for your products, you want to rank as high as possible in order to get more traffic.
Business owners find it very easy to create customized websites for increasing their business visibility and digital sales with user-friendly CMS platforms such as Magento and Shopify. However, many business owners lack SEO knowledge, which prevents them from driving network traffic and increasing e-commerce site sales.
If your website does not appear in the SERPs, you are missing out on valuable exposure to qualified and interested ecommerce customers. Your products may have a presence on the internet, but are they easily accessible?
This is where ecommerce SEO comes into play. It allows you to reach your target audience without spending money on advertisements. Once visitors arrive at your website, you can delight them with high-quality products, intriguing copy, and compelling calls to action.
What is ecommerce SEO?
Ecommerce SEO is the search engine optimization of an online store. Writing long descriptions with relevant keywords on every product page is an example of an optimization. Obtaining backlinks from relevant websites can also improve your online store’s ranking position.
Moreover it is the process of generating more organic (i.e., non-paid or free) traffic from sites like Google, Bing, and Yahoo to your online store.
E-commerce SEO is a digital marketing process that ensures that your site pages and your products are visible in the Google search results, thus attracting network traffic and increasing ROI.
Usually it involves optimizing your headlines, product descriptions, meta data, internal link structure, and navigational structure for search and user experience. Each product you sell should have a dedicated page designed to draw traffic from search engines.
However, you don’t want to forget about static, non-product-oriented pages on your site, such as the following:
Create a list of keywords for those pages as well as related keywords.
How does e-commerce SEO work?
E-commerce SEO is a free way of getting more traffic to your website by making it more visible on search engine result pages (SERPs). A well-ranked page will receive more traffic, so you want your page to rank as high as possible.
For your web pages to rank higher in SERPs, you need to ensure your website is optimized for search engines — from the keywords you use, to the technical setup of your web store, and whether your web store is mobile friendly all have a huge impact on SEO optimization. From a more practical standpoint, here are 4 areas to consider when setting up your e-commerce SEO strategy:
Content
Optimize your content with search terms for which you would like to be found: including your URL, H1 header, content, meta description and meta title.
Technical setup
Optimize the technical part of your web store: like for example HTTPS, mobile-friendliness, page speed, indexation, XML sitemap (this is the index for Google), etc.
User experience
Google leverages user statistics to determine which sites will rank on their search engine and in which order. This includes time on page, bounce rate, conversion rate, load time, etc. Ultimately, they want to know: can users find what they are looking for? Are you a reliable source of information? Proving so to Google can mean ranking on their first page of search results. And with 75% of people never looking past page 1 for their answer, this can add major value.
Link building
You need to think about which internal links (from within your website) and external links (from other sources) you link to and from. You also need to keep on top of other resources linking back to you for authority. Choosing the right sources or being the cited resource for another organization can help boost your credibility and brand reputation.
Why SEO For Ecommerce Matters?
What do consumers do when they need a product or service? Many perform Google searches. They’re looking for options, tips, comparisons, and other information to help them make informed decisions.
If your website doesn’t appear in the SERPs, you lose critical access to qualified and interested ecommerce customers. Your products might have a space on the web, but are they findable?
That’s where ecommerce SEO comes in. It provides you with a way to reach your target audience without paying for ads. Once you get people to your site, you can delight them with your high-quality products, intriguing copy, and motivating calls to action.
If you only optimize your website for people, you do your company a disservice. SEO for ecommerce addresses the first hurdle to acquiring new customers: getting people to your site.
What are the benefits of e-commerce SEO?
There are countless benefits to setting up an e-commerce SEO strategy. Here are the top 3 benefits to ecommerce SEO:
1. Improving your user experience
One of Google’s key ranking factors is providing users with a good user experience. If your site is targeting the right keywords for your target audience and answering queries that website visitors might have, then Google sees that as a positive experience and your ranking will consequently go up. But if users are clicking your site and immediately clicking away, Google will see that as a negative experience and it will hurt your ranking.
2. Expanding your reach
E-commerce SEO helps your web store receive more traffic, which consequently expands your brand’s reach. Once a user lands on your website organically, you can later reach out to that person again with paid retargeting campaigns. SEO remarketing is a highly effective practice.
3. Increasing brand awareness
You can optimize your e-commerce site with no marketing advertisement costs. If you’re optimizing your SEO rankings, why not try to aim to get your site on Google’s answer box. Being on Google’s answer box can bring in more clicks, higher website traffic and increased brand awareness.
What are the challenges of ecommerce SEO?
The challenges that many companies overlook when optimizing their ecommerce SEO are:
1. Lack of quality content
The biggest problem with optimizing e-commerce SEO is that some sites try doing so quickly and forget that it’s not just about the quantity of content. It’s about the quality of the content. Your product pages can’t just be a copy-paste of the manufacturers’ description, they need to be concise descriptions accompanied by pictures.
2. Forgetting about the technical setup
Although content is king, you can’t forget about your technical SEO setup. Things like HTTPS, mobile-friendliness, page speed, indexation, XML sitemap are often forgotten about.
How to do E-commerce SEO, Step-by-Step?
1. Technical SEO: The main motto of technical SEO is to enhance the user experience by providing informative results, giving them error-free navigation, and ensuring HTTPS security.
2. On-Page SEO for Category and Product Pages: The term “On-page SEO” means optimizing the website’s web pages to gain more traffic and SEO. After your website setup is over, it’s time to optimize the most powerful pages, i.e., category pages and product pages which help generate massive network traffic and sales. Ensure that your home page is connected with the majority of the category pages and product pages for better SEO rankings.
Tips for effective On-Page SEO for Category and Product Pages:
Several tools like Keyword Planner and Keyword Tool Dominator help in searching for target keywords for your audience.
3. E-commerce Content Marketing: Though your category pages and product pages can drive massive traffic to your e-commerce site, you may be losing out on prodigious traffic if you are not using content marketing strategies. Apart from quality content, internal linking, appropriate keywords, site optimization, consistent results, etc., play an undeniably crucial role in content marketing.
Your SEO is bound to fail if you are not a content marketer. Hence the integration of content marketing for SEO is essential to make your site visible to search engines. Content marketing is all about giving valuable, focused, and relevant content to your target audience to gain profits. It is a combination of content, images, videos, webinars, etc., which answers the audience’s questions in a refined way.
The best content marketing always amazes the audience with your products and compels them to buy the same. High-quality content, blogs, etc., can help gain more backlinks, clicks and, in turn, increase the sovereignty of the website. There are many content marketing tools like HubSpot, WordPress, Google Analytics, etc., which can help you plan, arrange and execute your marketing strategy successfully.
4. E-commerce Link Building: Link building is also one of the essentials for SEO. Links signal the search engines about your website’s quality and prove that they are worthy of visibility. Hence you may have noticed that sites with more backlinks have a strong SEO position since it increases the site authority. Research indicates that links are responsible for the success of SEO by 50%. Plan a strong link building strategy by considering:
If you are planning your website’s long-term potentiality, opt for natural link building instead to earn links. Never opt for manipulative methods to buy links which may result in banning your website from search results.
Backlinks help in product promotions and sales, thus increasing ROI. Many bloggers love your products so much that they tend to link your site in their content or on their website. Best Link Building Tricks:
5. Bonus: Local e-commerce SEO: This Local SEO permits you to punch in your address and contact details, thus making you popular in your area and city. This strategy makes your site more visible in local search results by the search engines. Busy routines and hectic schedules have made local SEO more popular and user-centric. The majority of the people search Google for “near me” options, thus making local SEO noticeable. It optimizes your online presence, which entices local searches of users.
Tips to Optimize Your Site for Local SEO:
6. Measure your E-commerce SEO Success: The final destination of any business is a success. The same is applicable for e-commerce stores also. Measure your SEO success results to know your position amongst competitors and take appropriate steps to improve sales and ROI constantly.
Tips for Measuring SEO Success:
SEO performance analysis tools like SEMrush help in analyzing your SEO efforts and website performance.